that I should get them if it were in his power to confer them.’
Chamberlain himself wrote to Fannie: ‘Picture to yourself a stout-looking fellow – face covered with beard – with a pair of cavalry pants on – sky blue – big enough for Goliath, and coarse as a sheep’s back…enveloped in a huge cavalry overcoat…and…cap with an immense rent in it…A shawl and rubber talma strapped on behind the saddle…2 pistols in holsters. Sword about three feet long at side – a piece of blue beef and some hard bread in the saddlebags. This figure seated on a magnificent horse gives that particular point and quality of incongruity which constitutes the ludicrous.’
Chamberlain and his regiment suffered their first experience of heavy action on 13 December at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Under fire, and cut off from their own right wing by a fence they were ordered to tear down, most of the men hesitated to expose themselves. Their lieutenant-colonel sprang angrily forward and began to tear the palings apart, shouting to his soldiers: ‘Do you want me to do it?’ They rushed the fence. He wrote later: ‘An officer is so absorbed by the sense of responsibility for his men, his cause, or for the fight that the thought of personal peril has no place whatever in governing his actions. The instinct to seek safety is overcome by the instinct of honour.’ His regiment’s discipline on that battlefield, advancing as if in parade order, roused the admiration of all who witnessed it. That night, Chamberlain slept uneasily between two corpses, with his head on a third. In the days of fighting that followed the regiment was conspicuous for its steadiness in ghastly circumstances. One night, visiting pickets, Chamberlain strayed into the Confederate lines and was challenged. A vision of inglorious captivity flashed before him. Improvising brilliantly, he began inspecting the trenches Confederate soldiers were digging, offering a word of encouragement and caution here and there. In the darkness, his uniform was invisible. ‘Keep a right sharp lookout!’ he urged, then strode back to his own men.
After losing Fredericksburg, the Union army retired to winter quarters for six weeks. Its men were dismayed and indeed enraged by the incompetence of its generals. Chamberlain and the 20th Maine were unusually fortunate in their colonel, Ames, an officer of energy and intelligence. They could not have learned from an abler tutor. Ames sacked some officers whom he considered incorrigible, and formed a close relationship with Chamberlain, with whom he shared a tent. An outbreak of smallpox caused the regiment to be employed on rear area guard duties, in quarantine, through the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, during which ‘Stonewall’ Jackson was mortally wounded, though Chamberlain contrived to have another horse shot under him on 4 May as he watched the army’s advance. Two weeks later, Ames was promoted to command a brigade. On his strong recommendation and that of his divisional general, the 20th Maine’s fighting professor took over the regiment.
It was a strange business, that such a man as Chamberlain should discover himself to be one of the rare breed who enjoys war, even while recoiling from its barbarity. He chose to perceive much of what befell him in Homeric terms, as an epic in which he thrilled to play a role. He was growing to realise that he might excel as a warrior. Such men are initially surprised to discover that they possess greater powers to endure than others, that their susceptibility to fear is overcome by strength of will and the need to exercise responsibility. Chamberlain always took pains to brief his men, possessing the rare skill of ensuring that those charged with a duty understood it. He knew that he possessed the bearing of a soldier, and was proud of this. The clean-shaven academic now boasted a great shaggy moustache. He possessed no false modesty about the gifts he had discovered in himself. More than anything, he was lucky – though heaven knows, not invulnerable: his head had already been grazed by a minie ball, and much worse would come later. Yet while a host of other officers of comparable courage and ability found their graves in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Chamberlain survived. This was due to no special skill of his, but rather to the fluke which throughout history has dictated which men survive to become legends and which are cut short, to form a legion of forgotten warriors.
Just six weeks after assuming command, on 1 July 1863, Chamberlain was hastening his men up a Pennsylvania road, amid applauding, cheering, and even singing Union sympathisers, towards a small town where the vanguard of the Northern army was already heavily engaged with Lee. It was a cloudless summer’s afternoon. The dusty men of the 5th Corps covered twenty-six miles – not nearly as far as 2nd Corps hiked that day, but enough. At last they halted to bivouac, and set about finding those indispensables for marching soldiers, water and fence rails for firewood. A galloper burst among them from the front. There was to be no bivouac: 5th Corps must keep marching. The army faced crisis. After the previous day’s heavy action, only the fall of darkness had prevented a Confederate triumph. Union forces had been obliged to fall back to new positions south of Gettysburg. It was plain that the action would be renewed at daybreak, and that a ridge between two eminences known as Culp’s Hill and Round Top must be held against Lee’s assault. As 5th Corps trudged on under moonlight, a rumour spread through the ranks that the ghost of George Washington had been seen riding across the battlefield on a white horse. Chamberlain wrote later: ‘Let no one smile at me! I half believed it myself.’
An hour after midnight, the regiment halted to rest for three hours, then set forth again without breaking its fast. Arrived early in the morning at the edge of the battlefield, at last they halted. A statement was read to them from General George Meade, now commanding the army, about the gravity of their task. Sporadic fire was already audible, yet for reasons that have baffled posterity, Lee was slow to launch his great assault. For some hours 5th Corps lingered in the rear, before at last it was committed to join the five-mile front along Cemetery Ridge, where the Army of the Potomac was to stand. Its commanders were granted vastly greater licence than they might have expected to deploy their eighty-eight thousand men, regiments still hastening forward piecemeal. Only late in the afternoon did Meade’s chief engineer Gouverneur Warren perceive to his horror that the key elevations of Round Top and Little Round Top, on the left flank of the line, were undefended and indeed unoccupied, save for a signal corps outpost stationed on the latter. He rushed 5th Corps forward from reserve, even as Long-street’s corps was making its laborious eight-mile detour in order to reach the start line for the Confederate assault unobserved by the Union army. The 15th Alabama Regiment, commanded by Colonel William C. Oates, together with elements of the 47th Alabama, was able to advance up Round Top, scattering the few Union skirmishers in the area, and occupy that hill without resistance.
Disaster threatened the Union. The way seemed open for Lee’s army to turn Meade’s flank and roll up his line. Oates called for Confederate cannon to be hustled up Round Top to sweep the blue-uniformed Union divisions. He himself proposed holding the dominant summit rather than pressing onwards, but his brigadier insisted on renewing the advance. After giving his men ten minutes’ rest following their exertions on the climb, Oates began to align them once more to assault Little Round Top, immediately to the north. He afterwards asserted that his decision to give his men a brief respite cost the Confederacy victory at Gettysburg. He may have been right.
At the last moment, Union commanders perceived the mass of Lee’s men closing on their left flank, preparing to seize Little Round Top. They recognised that if the few hundred yards’ frontage of this steep, wooded rock outcrop were lost, so was the battle. Colonel Strong Vincent, twenty-six-year-old commander of the 3rd Brigade which included 20th Maine, doubled his men towards the crest, shells already falling upon them. Chamberlain’s was the last of Vincent’s four regiments to fall into line at the southern extremity, with his brigadier’s order ‘You are to hold this ground at all costs.’ Another officer, Colonel James Rice, observed sonorously: ‘Colonel, we are making world history today.’ Chamberlain detached one company to cover his left flank from a distance, down the valley east of Round Top. This left him with 358 men to hold the summit. For a brief moment, three Chamberlain brothers were together on the field, for in addition to Tom, who was serving as Joshua’s adjutant, John had appeared as a civilian spectator. Then a shell exploded close by, and the colonel bade the little family group disperse: ‘Another such shot might make it hard for Mother.’
Below him, Chamberlain beheld chaos, with Confederate troops crowding the Devil’s Den and Plum Run gorge. Longstreet’s sharpshooters had a good view of the summit of Little Round Top, and brought a galling fire to bear on its defenders, which cost a stream of casualties. There could be